Pick and choose today from a LOT of important news and comment

Excerpt: Just Read It is a regular feature in which the
State Journal seeks recommendations from authors, literary enthusiasts and
experts, focused on the contributor’s particular genre of expertise. Bob Hall
is a Marine Vietnam veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts senate immediately after
college. From 1983 until pulmonary fibrosis forced his retirement in October
2013, he was a successful association executive. He has 11 books in print, with
the royalties going to charity. Hall, a political blogger based in Madison, is recovering
from a lung transplant on December 23, 2013. Here, he chooses three books to
spur thoughtful dialogue.

'Il
Silenzio'...Beautiful & Haunting: "The Silence" played by a 13-year-old

About six miles from Maastricht,
in the Netherlands, lie
buried 8,301 American soldiers who died in "Operation Market Garden"
in the battles to liberate Holland
in the fall/winter of 1944. Every one of the men buried in the cemetery,
as well as those in the Canadian and British military cemeteries, has been
adopted by a Dutch family who mind the grave, decorate it, and keep alive the
memory of the soldier they have adopted. It is even the custom to keep a
portrait of "their" American soldier in a place of honor in their
home. Annually, on "Liberation Day," memorial services are held
for "the men who died to liberate Holland." The day concludes with a
concert. The final piece is always "Il Silenzio," a memorial piece
commissioned by the Dutch and first played in 1965 on the 20th anniversary of Holland's liberation. It
has been the concluding piece of the memorial concert ever since. This
year the soloist was a 13-year-old Dutch girl, Melissa Venema, backed by André
Rieuand his orchestra (the Royal Orchestra of the Netherlands). This beautiful
concert piece is based upon the original version of taps and was composed by
Italian composer Nino Rossi.

Excerpt: Either Harry Truman, John Kennedy, or Lyndon
Johnson — or all of them — was supposed to have scoffed, in response to
objections, something like the following, “He may be a bastard, but at least
he’s our bastard.” That realist cynicism has more or less remained the same.
But now the ideology has flipped. Currently, the more that authoritarian thugs
abroad position themselves as anti-American, the more that we seem to glamorize
them. The new presidential sarcasm is, in effect, “He may be a bastard, but at
least he’s an anti-American bastard.”

Excerpt: I have long been preoccupied by the problem of
evil. Not being a philosopher, I have no satisfactory explanation of evil to
offer, nor even, indeed, a satisfactory definition of it. For me, evil is rather
like poetry was for Doctor Johnson: easier to say what it isn’t than what it
is. All I know for certain is that there’s a lot of it about - evil, I mean,
not poetry. Why? Is the heart of man irredeemably evil, or at any rate inclined
to evil? What are the conditions in which evil may flourish? My medical
practice, admittedly of a peculiar kind, in a slum and in a prison, convinced
me of the prevalence of evil. (On the genocide in Rwanda, from his essay collection, Anything Goes. ~Bob)

Older, worth reading: Madman who starved 60million to
death: Devastating book reveals how Mao's megalomania turned China into a
madhouse

Excerpt: The police log is chilling. ‘Date: March 1960,’ it
states, ‘Name of culprit: Zhu Shuangxi. Victims: Husband and elder son. Manner
of crime: Corpses exhumed and eaten.’ You gulp in horror as you realise
what this means — a woman cooked and ate the flesh of her own family. And then
comes the lie — arguably part of the greatest lie in modern history. ‘Reason
for crime: Livelihood issues.’ ‘Livelihood issues’? For that euphemism in the
official records of Red China under Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, read famine.

Excerpt: Mannatech has a long, checkered past, stretching
back to its founding more than a decade before Carson began touting the company’s
supplements. It was started by businessman Samuel L. Caster in late 1993, mere
“months,” the Wall Street Journal later noted, before
Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, which
greatly loosened restrictions on how supplement makers could market their
products. Within a few years of its inception, the company was marketing a wide
variety of “glyconutrient” products using many of the same tactics previously
described in lawsuits against
Eagle Shield, Caster’s first company. In November 2004, the mother of a child
with Tay-Sachs disease who died after being treated with Mannatech
products filed
suit against the company in Los Angeles Superior Court, seeking
damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent
misrepresentation, and conspiracy to commit fraud.

Excerpt: Randolph analyzed
the welfare situation for two groups -- single-parent households with two
children and two-parent households with two children -- in three Illinois counties,
looking at a range of welfare benefits: tax credits, food stamps and similar
programs, housing assistance, cash assistance, subsidies for child care and
health care benefits. What did he find?

For single-parent families, benefits could reach $47,894.
For two-parent families, benefits reached up to $41,237 in value. Combined
income and welfare benefits peak at a $12 hourly wage -- after that, benefits
begin to drop. Single parents would have to make between $35 and $38 hourly to
make up for the benefits that they lose earning at a $12 hourly rate. If a
single mother working for $8.25 to $12 per hour receives a pay raise, bumping
her earnings up to $18 per hour, she will end up with one-third fewer resources
due to a loss of welfare benefits.

Worth Reading:
With Romney and Bush in the picture, GOP’s 2016 field gets tricky and
more interesting. By Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake

Excerpt: Although much of the focus is on how Bush and
Romney would be battling each other for a finite group of major donors, the
real impact would not be on the two of them — each of whom could raise
$75 million easily — but rather on the rest of the “establishment” candidates
looking at the race. . Below are our
rankings of the 10 candidates considered the most likely to wind up as the
Republican nominee in 2016.

Excerpt: Croatia’s
conservative opposition candidate won a narrow presidential victory on Sunday
night, capitalising on popular discontent over economic decline and setting
down a marker for parliamentary elections later in the year. Kolinda
Grabar-Kitarović, a former diplomat, can expect months of tense cohabitation
with the Social Democrat-led government before Croatians vote again in the
general election due in late 2015.

Can Jeb Bush -- or
anyone -- come up with a platform for primaries, general, and presidency? By
Michael Barone

Excerpt: Looking back on my experience as a political
consultant, I have argued that successful candidates for executive posts —
mayor, governor, president — need to emphasize a short list (three or four)
policies which will work for them in the primaries, work in the general
election and, most important, work in governing. But few candidates manage to
do that, because it’s harder to do than to say. Republicans are tugged to the
right and Democrats to the left in primaries, after which a move to the center
is awkward and often unconvincing. (I have said for years that to win the
Republican nomination, you have to run far to the right. To win the Democrat nomination
you have to run far to the left. The winner of the general election is the one
who can scramble most successfully to the center and lie most convincingly
about the positions which won the nomination. ~Bob)

Excerpt: New York
City shouldn’t exist. Its population of waiters
waiting to become actors, professors waiting to write bestsellers, muggers
waiting to become drug kingpins, welfare cases waiting for American Idol and
cyclists waiting to become international humanitarians are the natural
constituency of the left. Like every major city in the last fifty years, New York City is caught
between a progressive death wish to embrace every single insane policy of the
left from midnight basketball for crackheads to a 99 percent tax on everyone
who has a job and the common sense competence that keeps it afloat.

Tom Steyer Could be
Keeping Cash for Himself, Not Florida in 2016, 2018. By Jeff Henderson

Excerpt: Democrats in Florida
and across the nation could be losing one of their biggest sugar daddies as Tom
Steyer mulls over running for office in California.
The California
billionaire vowed to make Rick Scott pay for not believing in global warming.
During last year’s election, Steyer spent more than $15 million against Scott
with his Next Gen Climate super-PAC and it didn’t pay off. Even worse for
Steyer, he spent big against Republican Senate candidates in key races and the
GOP won control from the Democrats. No doubt about it, the election cycle was
bad all the way around for Steyer. (Ah, those Democrat billionaires. Steyer was
the largest individual donor in 20124, followed by George Soros. Sheldon
Atkinson, the biggest GOP donor, as a distant third. ~Bob)

Excerpt: Mitt Romney is moving quickly to reassemble his
national political network, calling former aides, donors and other supporters
over the weekend and on Monday in a concerted push to signal his seriousness
about possibly launching a 2016 presidential campaign. Romney’s message, as he
told one senior Republican, was that he “almost certainly will” make what would
be his third bid for the White House. His aggressive outreach came as Rep. Paul
Ryan (R-Wis.) — Romney’s 2012 vice presidential running mate and the newly
installed chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee — announced Monday
that he would
not seek the presidency in 2016. (Here’s the good news, Republicans.
Mitt Romney is running to save the party from nominating Jeb Bush, and Jeb Bush
is running to save the party from nominating Mitt Romney. It’s as if O. Henry
moved into political coverage. -- Jim Geraghty, Morning Jolt. Though I have concerns about both, either would be a
far better president than what we have now. Between them, they may suck all the
air out of the room for other candidates. ~Bob)

Excerpt: Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative
Affairs Elizabeth L. King – appointed to the post by President Barack Obama in
2009 – says the cost of notifying soldiers of possible exposure to toxins at Fort McClellan, Alabama
is too high following the bases closure in 1999. (But at the same time, the VA,
at the direction of Congress, is sending millions of veterans who don't
qualify, because we live within 40 miles of a VA facility, Choice Cards to use
private health care. Congress wants us to know they are doing something about
the VA, even if it's an expensive waste of tax dollars. ~Bob)

Excerpt: The first conservative has walked off the field
before the Republican race for president has begun. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.,
today announced he will not run in 2016, saying he wants to concentrate on his
new chairmanship of a major tax-writing committee. Ryan, a popular conservative
who won his ninth House term Nov. 4, became much better known to Americans as
GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s running mate in the 2012 presidential campaign.
(Lierals considered him a threat--you can tell by who they demonize. ~Bob)

Excerpt: As I noted
the other day, the folks who are urging Elizabeth Warren to run for
president are paying very close attention to her use of verbal tenses. Warren
has frequently cast her denials of an intention to run in the present tense
— I am not running, she has said, without ruling out a run in the
future — which the Draft Warren movement has taken as a reason to continue
pressing her to do just that.

Excerpt: All of a sudden he goes, ‘Give me all your money,’
so I started pulling out bills and everything,” Pat Coats told WRDW-TV, adding
that Dempsey had a gun and was waving it around. Dempsey started to walk away
with nearly $300 — but was stopped in his tracks by his own firearm.

Company to Sell Fake,
Decoy Guns to People Who Want to Appear to Be Armed, but Not Own Firearms

Excerpt: It appears that a new company is set to begin
selling fake guns/holsters to people who want to appear to be armed but don’t
want to go through the actual hassle of owning and training with a firearm. Because
we all know that you just strap a firearm to your body and all trouble will
magically leave you alone forever (please not heavy sarcasm in that sentence).
(A REALLY stupid idea. if you appear to be armed, the thugs will take you out
first and you won't be able to defend yourself. I would go unarmed before I
would carry an unloaded gun, for the same reason. ~Bob)

Excerpt: We’ve chronicled some “interesting” statements made
by supporters of gun control here at Bearing Arms over the last few
years. A constant note of quasi-religion mania has always hidden in their
voices, and it is often instructive when they get particularly excited and they
go off-script… an occurrence which almost never ends well for them, as they
tend to reveal more about how they feel about the average American than they
should.

The most recent example of a gun control supporter letting
the mask slip is when the head of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, the
ironically named Leah Gun-Barrett, let her true feelings be known about gun
owners after she debated NRA board member Scott Bach at New York University, and what a slip it was: ... “You can be perfectly
law-abiding one moment,” said Ms. Gunn-Barrett during the debate, “and then the
next moment you can be a criminal and do something criminal and wrong, like
shoot up a movie theater, or kill your spouse during an argument.” Regulation
of people and behavior is needed, she said, “to protect us against our own
stupidity and our own irrationality.” (If you said to her, "You can be a
perfectly law-abiding Muslim one minutes and the next moment you can go Jihad
and k\murder innocent people," she would likely stroke out. ~Bob)

Excerpt: If Webster sounds like a broken record, it’s
because gun control supporters started pushing their firearm-phobic theory way
back when turntables were still all the rage. And like a needle that won’t skip
to the next groove in a scratched LP, they have continued to repeat the
argument for years. Meanwhile, one state after another adopted Right-to-Carry
laws without the parade of horrors gun control advocates predicted. ...
Contrast anti-gunner hysteria with the reaction of Illinois law enforcement officials to their
state’s new Right-to-Carry law a year after its enactment. The Champaign/Urbana
News-Gazette reports that
according to law enforcement officials in several communities, the law hasn’t
resulted in problems.

Excerpt: Utah Governor Gary Herbert and North Carolina
Governor Pat McCrory have asked President Obama to allow them to include work
requirements in their Medicaid programs. Work requirements were critical to
the success of welfare reform in 1996 and would also change Medicaid from a
dependency-trap to a true safety net. The best way to achieve it would be
through legislation, not relying on executive action. A new study I’ve written for the NationalCenter for Policy Analysis explains how
including Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program
(CHIP) as part of safety-net reform, instead of keeping health care in its
own silo, would greatly improve the federal welfare state for both recipients
and taxpayers. Fortunately, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan
(R-Wis.) has proposed reforms to the federal safety net that could include
Medicaid and CHIP.

Excerpt: Potentially life-saving drugs spend years
undergoing FDA review, limiting ill patients' ability to access what might be
miracle treatments. In a new report, Lindsay Boyd of the Beacon Center of
Tennessee explains what FDA regulation has done to drug access. ... In 1951,
there were just 1,000 staffers working for the FDA. Twenty years later, the
agency had 6,500 employees. It now costs from $500 million to a whopping $2
billion to get a drug to market. There is less drug development today than there
was in 1962. Since 1970, patients have had to wait more than 10 years for new,
and potentially life-saving, drugs.

Excerpt: More than thirty Senate Democrats on Monday voted
against the idea of starting work on a bill to approve the Keystone oil
pipeline, even though no Democrats at all objected when a similar vote came up
in November, when considering the bill was seen as a way to keep Sen. Mary
Landrieu (D-La.) in the Senate.

Religion of Peace News

40 World Leaders in France Stand Up
for Freedom Against the Terrorists. One Major Figure Was Missing.

Excerpt: The massive crowd included more than 40 world leaders, but President Obama was nowhere to be
found. (He was too busy studying the Keystone Pipeline, as he has for six
years. ~Bob. Why Didn’t Obama Join the World Leaders’
March for Free Expression and to Oppose Islamism? Because He
Thought It Was ‘Leaders Only’ -- Jim Geraghty, Morning Jolt)

Excerpt: President Barack Obama's absence from the great
gathering in Paris of national leaders from
other countries, to show their solidarity with France in its opposition to Islamic
terrorists, was another sign of the Obama administration's continuing
irresolution in the face of terror.

Even the recent courageous message of Egypt's president,
Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, calling on his fellow Muslims around the world to
"revolutionize" the interpretation of Islam, to make it more
compatible with peaceful relations with other peoples, put no steel in the
spine of Barack Obama.

Excerpt: Ah, now I understand why Obama didn’t make it to Paris for the unity rally.
He was busy wasting his day watching both NFL playoff football
games. Tomorrow is yet another busy day for Obama. He will host the
San Antonio Spurs at the White House for winning the 2014 NBA championship.
Talk about your priorities. What a smack in the face to those (and their
families) who died at the hands of Muslim terrorists this past week.

Obama AWOL in Paris:
Message to America, allies is we don't care. By Douglas E. Schoen

Excerpt: Sunday, President Obama morally abdicated his place
as the leader of the free world.

His decision to stay home instead of standing side by side
with French President Hollande as millions marched in Paris in solidarity with the slain
journalists of Charlie Hebdo in opposition to radical Islam – an enemy fiercer
than we have seen in decades – sent a clear message to the world: Obama just
doesn’t care.

Excerpt: The uproar over whether President Obama or another
top administration official should have attended the massive unity rally in Paris has obscured an important point about the White
House's reaction to the latest terror attacks in Europe.
The administration no-shows were not a failure of optics, or a diplomatic
misstep, but were instead the logical result of the president's years-long
effort to downgrade the threat of terrorism and move on to other things.

The simplest explanation -- and one that doesn’t contradict
option three -- is that President Barack Obama doesn’t really want to put his
personal stature and credibility on the line to support something
like Charlie Hebdo. Since those awful attacks, we’ve witnessed a lot of
allegedly intellectual leftists offer versions of “the attacks were terrible, but--”
and then explaining why Hebdo was offensive, hate speech, an
unnecessary provocation, foolish, etc., and imply that the magazine isn’t
really worth defending and that the world would be a better place if these
immature, impudent cartoonists would stop making fun of one of the world’s
great religions. There’s very little evidence to suggest that Obama disagrees
with this progressive intellectual reaction, that while satire of Islam is
theoretically legal, the consequences of enraging Muslims is too much trouble
and risk to be worthwhile. We saw this in the response
to Hebdo before, and the infamous YouTube video that the
administration cited as a scapegoat for the Benghazi attacks. To a lot of progressives,
while depicting Mohammed or mocking Islam shouldn’t be banned, it should be
discouraged, and a presidential appearance at that rally and march is too close
to an official endorsement.

Excerpt: Several stones and an incendiary device were thrown
through the window of the archive of the regional tabloid daily, the Hamburger
Morgenpost, early on Sunday morning. The paper had splashed three Charlie
Hebdo cartoons on its front page after the Paris massacre, running the headline “This
much freedom must be possible!” (Expect a NYT's editorial excusing their
cowardice, entitled, "Morganpost had it coming." ~Bob)

The Official
Apologist for Murder and Terror for The New York Times: Nicholas Kristof
#CharlieHebdo

Excerpt: On the day when journalists were massacred
in Paris, while blood still ran wet where they had fallen, and as eye
witnesses described the killers' shouts of "Allahu Akbar" –
"Allah is great" – the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof asked
the world not to judge the killers too quickly: most urgently, he said, don't jump to the conclusion they are Muslims.

Excerpt: Charlie Hebdo isn't backing down! Defying the jihadists,
the French weekly published millions of papers lampooning Mohammed. As Hebdo
well knows, this is dangerous business, given that hundreds of millions of
Muslims actually support killing those who 'defile' their pedophile founder.

Excerpt: In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, several jihadist
groups have released statements lauding both the murders and the terrorists
responsible. Jihadists within al Qaeda's international network as well as those
linked to the Islamic State have commented on the massacre. Several of the
statements below were first obtained and translated by the SITE Intelligence
Group.

Johannesburg
- Years of taunting, insulting and humiliating caricatures of the revered
Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), immigrants, blacks and Muslims by the satirical
Charlie Hebdo magazine has resulted in what the French authorities have long
warned against – an explosion of violence leading to the tragic deaths and
injuries of 17 people. President Hollande described this attack as an assault
on secular French values, democracy, freedom of speech and expression,
condemning “Islamic terrorists” for perpetrating these heinous crimes. But the
bloodbath in Paris
has nothing to do with freedom of speech or with Islam.

From a blog reader

Are people beginning to realize that maybe Islam is the
problem, or is it still at least partly the Jew's fault? --GS. (Partly? And,
no, that isn't Israel's
fault is, like global warming and high speed rain, an non-negotiable part of
the ProgressiveChurch's Confession of Faith. ~Bob

Excerpt: While the world remained transfixed on the
atrocities perpetrated by radical Islamists in Paris,
a far more extensive slaughter was being conducted in Nigeria. The
African Islamofascist terrorist group Boko Haram killed as many as 2,000 people
in horrific attacks on northern Nigerian villages that left bodies scattered as
far as the eye could see.

Excerpt: The west is in a holy war with militant Islam, our
God against their God. The trouble is, we don’t believe in our God, so we can’t
see the situation truly. When I say “we” don’t believe in our God, I’m not, of
course, talking about those who have thought the matter through to its core,
those who have gone beyond straw-man smack-downs in which Biblical Literalism
takes on Scientific Materialism, those who understand that there can be no
rational claim to objective good without the existence of a Supreme Good, and
who know that evil is evil everywhere, no matter what the culture, what the
time. I’m talking instead about those who have been swept away by the
prejudices of the age, who wallow in the vague sense that “science” has somehow
disproved “religion,” that we’re beyond all that faith stuff now. I’m talking
about those who are still in some kind of adolescent-versus-Daddy argument with
a medieval authority that no longer exists, or are rebelling against some
doctrine they don’t like and haven’t taken the time to understand. I’m talking
about our political, journalistic, academic and entertainment elites. Who are
fools, as most of us know. (What a great job at clarifying the contrasts
between Judao-Christian heritage and fundamentalist Islam. The way you serve
your God depends on the vision you have of Him. As someone famous said,
worshipping a cruel god tends to produce cruel men. PS--And here's a link to a
video from four years ago, that somehow seems to be quite useful today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKerbOi_mrI#t=185
--Del)

Excerpt: France
deployed 10,000 troops at Jewish schools, synagogues and other sites in an
unprecedented security boost Monday as authorities remained on high alert after
last week’s deadly attacks in Paris.
The extraordinary measures marked the first time such a large military force in
France has been used in civilian protection, and brought the latest images of
troops on Western streets — scenes reminiscent of the aftermath of the Sept.
11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States and later attacks in London
and Madrid.

“She was definitely
killed because she was Jewish.” By Robert Spencer, JihadWatch.org

Excerpt: CNN has a video interview here with Sophie Bramly, whose cousin Elsa Cayat was
the only woman killed in the terror attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris. “You will surely
find the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers [to be]
the Jews…” Qur’an 5:82

Excerpt: The case of France is stark. Roughly 12 percent
of its population is foreign-born, about the European average, according to the
Migration Policy Institute. But it also has a particularly high percentage of
descendants of immigrants. Because of France’s
colonial history in Algeria
and other countries in the Maghreb, many of
them are Muslim. It has the largest Muslim population of any Western European
country, both in absolute numbers and in percentage terms.

The man who attacked a Kosher grocery store in Paris,
killing four hostages and a policewoman in violent support of the jihadis who
attacked the office of Charlie Hebdo, declared allegiance to ISIL. In a YouTube video, he
said, "What we are doing is completely legitimate." With al-Qaida in
the Arabian Peninsula allegedly funding and directing the attack on the Charlie
Hebdo office, the Director General for MI5 (British intelligence) made a rare
appearance to warn, "A group of core al-Qaida terrorists in Syria is
planning mass casualty attacks against the West." The Canadian Prime
Minister also didn't mince words about the threat of Muslims waging
jihad against the West: "They have declared war on any country like
ourselves that values freedom, openness and tolerance." But the United States, the home of the free and land of
the brave, is still waffling on whether the Paris attacks were perpetrated by jihadis.
U.S. State Department Spokeswoman Marie Harf said, "First, I think, again, there are a lot of
unknowns here. We're certainly not jumping to conclusions." Heaven forbid
she call a spade a spade.

Excerpt: In response to the massacre of the staff of the
French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, the French-language Canadian
newspaper Le Journal Montréal included a
connect-the-dot picture of "Mohammed" in today's issue so that its
readers can "draw" their very own Mohammed cartoon.

Once to Every Man and
Nation. By James Russell Lowell

Once to ev'ry man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;

Some great cause, some great decision,
Off'ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
'Twixt that darkness and that light.

Tho' the cause of evil prosper,
Yet the truth alone is strong;
Tho' her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong;

Excerpt: The Palestinian Authority could face $1 billion or
more in damages if a federal jury in New York
finds it liable for a series of terrorist attacks in Israel which killed and injured
American citizens. The attacks took place between 2001 and 2004. According to
the civil complaint, the terrorists were either on the payroll
of the Palestinian Authority or the Palestine Liberation Organization. Their
families later received martyr pay and other forms of support from the
Authority. (They won't win. It's in the Progressive Constitution that the
courts may not make non-PC rulings. ~Bob)

Excerpt: He has an explanation for why Turks should not
celebrate the New Year: "[A verse in the sura] Maida tells Muslims not to
make friends with Jews and Christians. This [commandment] also means that
Muslims should not adopt their traditions." The logic is simple: If a
Muslim celebrates the New Year s/he will have adopted a Christian tradition and
will have made friends with Christians and therefore have sinned. (Don't tell
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that the Turks still have Sunday as the
week's official holiday!) All the same, despite their restless efforts, the
Turks still lag far behind the Saudis in ridiculing Islam. As Raymond Ibrahim
at the Middle East Forum notes, Saudi
Arabia's Grand Mufti, the country's highest
religious authority, recently said "There is nothing wrong with girls
below 15 getting married."

On Sunday, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Attorney
General Eric Holder, "Is the U.S. at war with radical
Islam?" Holder replied, "Well, I certainly think that we are at war
with those who would commit terrorist attacks and who would corrupt the Islamic
faith in the way that they do, to try to justify their terrorist actions."
The administration always tries to define Islamic faith as
"peaceful," seeking to separate jihadis from "legitimate"
Islam. But either way, Holder says, we're winning. "[W]e have decimated
core al-Qaida," he said, repeating a tired refrain, "and I think we
have decreased if not eliminated their ability to do the kinds of things that
they did on September the 11th." He then pointed again to "lone wolf"
attacks as the future. He's probably correct that the types of attack we've
seen in Paris, Australia
and Canada, as well as FortHood
and Boston, are
indeed the future -- as opposed to flying airliners into buildings -- but that
doesn't mean these jihadis are "lone wolves." On the contrary, they
are united by radical Islam. On a final note, the Obama administration
couldn't even be bothered to acknowledge our oldest ally, France, by sending a representative to the weekend rally in Paris
-- and Holder was in Paris for
an anti-"violent extremism" summit. So they coddle enemies and snub
allies. Par for the course.

Afghan National
Police: More than $300 Million in Annual, U.S.-funded Salary Payments Is Based
on Partially Verified or Reconciled Data

Excerpt: After 9 years of effort, an electronic human resources
system has still not been successfully implemented. Reports have disclosed
inflated police rosters, payments being made to more police personnel than are
authorized in particular locations, and police personnel receiving inflated
salaries. 20 percent of ANP personnel are at risk of not receiving their full
salaries because they are paid in cash by an MOI-appointed trusted agent, where
as much as half of these payments are possibly diverted. U.S. officials
confirmed that over the past year they accepted, without question, all
personnel totals provided by the Afghan Ministry of Interior.

Excerpt: According to an article from The Christian
Post, certain public schools in Michigan
have begun to allow prayer in school. I know what you’re thinking. This is
outrageous! Isn’t that against the law?! Keep calm, ye separation of church,
and state crusaders, for it is not Christians or Jews who are being allowed to
pray, but Muslims. Whew! You can all go back to watching today’s Daily Show.

Excerpt: A series of tweets were sent out with sensitive
information about U.S.
military strategy toward North Korea
and China.
The tweets also threatened military personnel and their families. UPDATE: The
information that was posted on the account has been verified by intelligence
sources as real information hacked directly from CENTCOMM, meaning this wasn't
simply a hack of a Twitter account, but against CENTCOMM itself. (Very timely
warning. I just purchased "Lazarus Man," a new thriller by Chet
Nagle, a naval aviator and former CIA agent, about Cyberwar. I greatly enjoyed
his previous novels about terrorism, "The Iran Covenant" and
"The Woolsorters Plague," though they are quite frightening. ~Bob)

Good to see: Moroccan-born mayor of Rotterdam tells fellow Muslims who do not
appreciate the 'freedoms' of living in the West to 'pack your bags and f***
off' on live TV

Excerpt: Ahmed Aboutaleb, who arrived in the Netherlands aged 15, spoke out in the wake of
the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris
last week. Appearing on live television just hours after the shootings, Mayor
Aboutaleb said Muslims who ‘do not like freedom can pack your bags and leave’. Labour
politician Ahmed Aboutaleb, a former journalist who was appointed mayor of the
Dutch city in 2008, is known for his straight-forward stance on integration.

We never learn: Meet the shadowy figure recruiting
for the Islamic State in Afghanistan.
By Dan Lamothe

Excerpt: Several reports in the last few days suggest that
the Islamic State is now recruiting in southern Afghanistan,
the spiritual heart of the Taliban and the site of fierce combat between U.S. troops and
insurgents in recent years. At the
center of it: a former Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detainee who led a Taliban unit before the
U.S.
sent forces into the country in 2001. (Note to troops: If you capture a
jihadist, some politician will eventually let him out to kill your brothers. If
you kill him, no problem in the future. Dead terrorists have a zero recidivism
rate. ~Bob)

Excerpt: Filling in as guest host on “The Kelly
File” Monday night, Martha MacCallum pressed State Department deputy
spokeswoman Marie Harf on why the Obama administration is seemingly reluctant
to declare that radical Islam is the biggest threat currently facing the United States.

Excerpt: The president of the United
States has somehow put himself on the opposite side of an
Islamic theological debate from the Muslim president of Egypt.
President Obama has aligned himself with revivalist groups — including the
Muslim Brotherhood — that are trying to promote traditionalist Islam, while
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has begun championing Islamic
modernizers.

Excerpt: A new ISIS
propaganda video features a child executing two alleged Russian spies.

The child executioner, known as Abdullah, looks no
older than 11 or 12. ... The terrorist organization’s propaganda arm, Al-Hayat
Media, has produced several videos in the languages of particular Muslim
populations, including Indonesian and German. Russian-speaking jihadis, including
those from Kazakhstan
and other Central Asian countries, have been featured in previous videos,
including November’s “A Visit To Mosul” and “Race Towards Good.” (Why do they
do this type of thing? Because it wins them support among Muslims. ~Bob)

When Turks Die, Intention is in the Eye of the Beholder. By
Burak Bekdil

Excerpt: Exactly 582 days after the raid on the Mavi
Marmara, on December 28, 2011, the Turkish Air Force bombed a group of mostly
teenage villagers from Uludere (Roboski in Kurdish), in predominantly Kurdish
southeastern Turkey. Mistaking them for pro-independence Kurdish terrorists,
they killed 34 civilians. December 28, 2014 was the third anniversary of what
the Turkish collective memory bitterly recalls as the "Uludere
incident." Fifteen months after the Uludere incident, the Turkish
parliament's Human Rights Examination Commission approved a report drafted by a
sub-commission assigned to examine the controversy over the killings. The
Uludere report concluded that the investigations produced no evidence that the
attack was intentional.

Excerpt: For 26 years, the Associated Press has posted the
offensive image titled Piss Christ. Supposedly a work of art, the image is of a
crucifix in a jar of the photographer’s urine. Many Christians and Christian
organizations have complained to the Associate Press telling them that the
image is offensive, denigrating and blasphemous, but AP justified posting the
image claiming it was art. However, the same Associated Press staff refused to
post any of the political cartoons depicting the Islamic Prophet Muhammad, like
those published in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo that led to the Islamic
terrorist attack that killed a dozen people. (Well, offending Christians and
Jews isn't dangerous; offending Muslims gets you killed. ~Bob)

Excerpt: Since 9/11, the Western world's academic, media,
political elites have done their best to portray Islam in a favorable light,
treating it very differently from all other religions. Criticism of every
doctrine, religious or secular, is permitted, often encouraged. But not of
Islam. Only positive depictions are allowed.

Excerpt: A headline in London
exclaims that what happened in Paris "has
galvanized France."
Well, that's good, so far as it goes. Galvanized can be a good thing only if
the galvanizee stays galvanized. The record is not encouraging. September 11
galvanized the world, a date that, like December 7, would live in infamy. In
the wake of September 11 a leading newspaper in Paris proclaimed that "we are all
Americans now." President George W. Bush, standing in the ruins of the WorldTradeCenter, with wisps of smoke and ash curling at his
feet, promised to avenge the blood and bone of the 3,000 Americans who perished
on a day with a harvest of dead to rival that at Antietam or Pearl
Harbor. We know how all that turned out, galvanized or not.

Excerpt: The late Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial
cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times, Paul
Conrad, frequently used religious symbols to illustrate his point of view.
Conrad drew the ire of some readers whenever he used the Star of David or a
cross in his drawings. Letters to the editor denounced him, but to my knowledge
no one showed up at the newspaper to kill him. This is the difference between
radical Islam and other faiths. Jews and Christians have been targets of
persecution, but with rare exceptions in modern times those faiths do not
encourage, or tolerate, murder in the name of God.

Excerpt: The full impact of Western intervention in Libya was recently highlighted during a televised interview of Worlds Apart with
guest Hanne Nabintu Herland, a Norwegian author and historian who was born and
raised in Africa for 20 years. At one point
while talking about Libya, Herland firmly asserted that: "In a just world,
the political leaders in the West, that have done such atrocities towards other
nations and other cultures, should have been sent to the Hague [International
Criminal Court], and judged at the Hague, for atrocities against humanity."

Islamic State of Tripoli announces kidnap
of 21 Christian “Crusaders.” By Robert Spencer, JihadWatch.org

Excerpt: The jihad war against the indigenous Christians of
the Middle East continues, courtesy of the
Islamic State’s Libyan arm. From the looks of these photos, these are not
Western “invaders,” but Christians from the area. But keep this quiet: “Talk
about extreme, militant Islamists and the atrocities that they have perpetrated
globally might undercut the positive achievements that we Catholics have
attained in our inter-religious dialogue with devout Muslims.” — Robert McManus, Roman Catholic Bishop of Worcester,
Massachusetts, February 8, 2013